


Here Be Dragons

by TheXWoman



Series: Siren Song [1]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, Do we all agree they had sex in season 7, Episode: s07e17 All Things, Eventual Smut, F/M, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Hopeful Ending, One Night Stands, POV Dana Scully, Porn with Feelings, Romance, Sad Ending, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-30
Updated: 2021-01-30
Packaged: 2021-03-16 08:48:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,854
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29079618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheXWoman/pseuds/TheXWoman
Summary: Scully had spent months playing and replaying this scenario in her head. Nights when her fingers brushed against her throbbing skin as she whispered his name in the dark, finally falling out of her self-induced passion to bury her head in her pillow. Then she wallowed in the fear that dissuaded her from ever stepping into the frightening void of unmarked territories – here be dragons, she would think, her breath stilling in her throat.But this wasn’t a siren song meant to consume her within a cold and unyielding tempest. This was the voice of love, and it was calling her home.
Relationships: Fox Mulder/Dana Scully
Series: Siren Song [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2148423
Comments: 20
Kudos: 80





	Here Be Dragons

**Author's Note:**

> My obligatory, and long overdue, take on what happened at the end of "all things." 
> 
> _Your name has echoed through my mind  
>  and I just think you should, think you should know  
> that nothing safe is worth the drive  
> and I will follow you, follow you home_  
> \- Treacherous, Taylor Swift

When she awoke in the night, her neck bent stiffly against the back of the cheap leather couch, it took longer than usual for the fog of sleep to drift away. Soft shadows spilled through the drawn shades only to dwindle in the glow of the fish tank. Scully stared at the stream of bubbles rising through the tank and recalled a theory that owning fish was supposed to extend life expectancy. Something about lowering heart rates and eliciting a calmness.

It sounded like junk science at the time and she still wasn’t convinced. The rush of the water through the filter made her feel uneasy in the dark, at odds with herself, like it was awakening a strange creature coiled in her stomach and pressed against her spine.

Scully slept on Mulder’s couch more times than she would admit or bothered to count. Long nights shifting through casefiles and staring blankly at crime scene photos mutated the familiar drive back to Georgetown into an unmanageable, sinister quest in the midnight hours. It was easier to forgo it altogether and curl up in the warmth of his living room.

Blinking lazily into the dark, the last thing Scully remembered was the comforting familiarity of his voice as her consciousness faded into oblivion. If she dreamed, she didn’t remember it. Maybe her talk of messages and visions exhausted that part of her brain enough to attain a moment of peace. Now awake, alert, and somewhat uncomfortable in her day clothes, her neck ached from the bad angle it kept while she slumbered.

 _You’re 36_ , she chided herself as she straightened her spine and rolled her neck slowly to work out that clinging kink. _Admit it, Dana. The times of crashing on your best friend’s couch and expecting your body to bounce back in the morning is a thing of the past._

It was only technically morning. The VCR blinked 2:17 am – give or take an hour, she reckoned, depending on if Mulder remembered to adjust it back from Daylight Savings. For a man of such staggering brilliance, he often missed the mundane.

She passed the thick blanket from her lap to the arm of the couch and considered the drive home. A cup of coffee might abscond the last of her fuzzy mind, but that both risked rousing Mulder and wiring herself too much to go back to sleep once she was home. And there was no way in hell she was going to throw in the towel and start her workweek at 3 am.

Whatever. More than anything, she needed to pee. The bathroom was through Mulder’s bedroom and it was enough to broach that short journey before she considered the next one. Scully pulled herself to her feet and padded softly across the living room.

The faint smell of sweat, cologne, and exhaustion lingered in the air of his bedroom. Smells that were specifically Mulder, pleasant and familiar. She stilled as that coiled creature within seemed to stretch its stiff limbs – aching, itching. It reminded her of seventh grade when she stumbled in the gym and instinctively braced herself with her hand against the slick vinyl of the basketball court only to end up in a cast for six weeks. She would dig under it, her mother constantly admonishing her for the attempt, as she tried to swipe a nail against a longing she could never reach.

This was the same. It got worse, over the last year, and she had found nothing to relieve the coiled tendrils tickling forth a pricking in her heart.

Her eyes wandered over him in the bed, curled in a mess of blankets, his cheek plump against the pillow beneath it, and she breathed a discouraged sigh.

She quietly closed the bathroom door and kept the light off in her best attempt to not wake him. The cascade of water to clean her hands and the flush of the toilet echoed unnaturally loud in the lingering silence, punctuated only by her breaths, but she seemed successful. She just had to sneak back through the room and to the couch, where she had already resigned to spend the rest of the night.

It would have gone to plan had she not misjudged the distance of the sink. Her wrist caught the handle of his hairbrush and sent it careening to the floor. It clacked like a roll of thunder against the linoleum.

She lingered for a moment in the following silence before she let out a slow breath and she stepped back into his bedroom.

“Scully?”

His voice thick with sleep, she had a little hope he’d easily slip back into slumber. She, however, was wide awake now, annoyingly so, but that didn’t mean Mulder had to add another half-slept night to his docket on her account.

“I just needed the bathroom,” she whispered as she stumbled towards the bed in the dark. “Go back to sleep.”

He roused and pushed himself up to look at her. The sheets slid down his body and her gaze passed over the jut of his shoulder blades. His smooth skin reflected in the lights from the street, and she wondered what it would feel like to trace her name onto the rippling muscles of his back.

“What time is it?”

“A little after two.”

“Don’t drive home. It’s late. I don’t want you to drive home.” His concern was effortless, guileless beneath his sleep-sodden words, enchanting in their fervent innocence. Against her judgment, Scully sunk next to him on the bed.

“I’m not driving home.” She tangled her fingers through his mussed hair, soothing him. “I’m staying on the couch. Go back to sleep.”

“You can sleep here.” He scooted away from her and patted the crumpled sheets. “I would have tucked you in myself, but I didn’t want to wake you.”

“Mulder, you’re jetlagged. I’m fine on the couch.”

He sighed and turned his face to look up at her. He was fully awake. The complete awareness of his offer put a lump in her throat.

“It’s not like we haven’t shared a bed before.”

They hadn’t, technically, but it did occur to Scully that was, technically, the only line they hadn’t crossed. No doubt they could lay side by side in a bed together, but for how long before she felt the need to run her hands through his hair again, to brush her palms over the curve of his spine, to risk learning how he tastes.

“Mulder, don’t do this.” She stood up and he caught her hand to wrap his fingers gingerly around hers. He gave her plenty of distance to pull away. She didn’t.

“No ulterior motives. No expectations. I just want to hold you.”

Her breath escaped in one long movement of submission. She sunk into the bed and pressed her back to him. He put his arms around her and the tickle of his breath against the back of her neck made her hold back a whimper. She longed for more than that. She knew he did, too.

“Why did you come back from England early, Mulder?”

He didn’t respond, long enough for her to wonder if he’d fallen asleep again. It startled her when he cleared his throat, his head shifting to rest his mouth next to her ear.

“It doesn’t feel right doing anything without you.”

She pressed her eyes shut, hesitant to embrace the jolt in her stomach. Scully rolled in his arms to face him, their noses only inches apart. She sought out his open eyes in the darkness and found them staring at her with gut-wrenching affection. It broke her heart when he looked at her like that, if only because she worried he never saw that same look in her eyes.

“I need time.” It may have sounded like a shift in subject, like she was talking past him. But that often how it worked between them – sometimes the words they said barely brushed the surface, and they had to let their hearts fill in the deeper meaning.

“I know,” he whispered, reaching up to tuck a stray hair behind her ear. Her eyes fluttered shut for a moment. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe some things don’t happen for a reason.”

His hand moved down her shoulder, the weight of it pressing through her shirt, and she wished that barrier away. That took determined movement, though, not just thought, and she wasn’t sure she had the strength.

“That path is treacherous,” she murmured. “We can’t spend our lives second-guessing every step, thinking we missed the signs in a rush to move forward.”

“But we can still acknowledge a difference between that which won’t happen and that which hasn’t happened yet.”

He mapped the folds of her shirt in starts and stops as if prepared to have her push him away.

“Mulder…”

“Hey.” He lifted his head slightly, adjusting himself on the pillow to move slightly closer to her. “We don’t have to talk about it. We don’t have to name it. But we’ve fought for so much over the years, Scully. Maybe this is one fight we should let ourselves lose. Even if it’s just tonight.”

She took a moment to absorb his words, to swirl them in her brain like aerating a fine wine, her lips pursing in anticipation to take a sip. The coiled animal in her stomach stirred and she wished for its submission. Scully slipped out of the bed and to her feet and Mulder’s disappointment radiated against her back.

No, not disappointment. Disappointment was what you saw in the eyes of the man at the bar when you turned down his request for your number. This wasn’t disappointment. It was devastation.

When she turned to face him, he looked up at her from the bed, his weary eyes clouded in the dark. She wanted to take that weariness from him and absorb it into her own equally exhausted but perhaps slightly less fractured soul. To bear the weight for him for even just a moment, long enough for him to catch his breath.

He watched her from the bed but had no intention to argue his case any more than she had the intention to make him beg. From the rocky foundation of their relationship bloomed mutual respect, a sacred trust, and subpar communication. She knew talking wasn’t their strong suit, but who needed words when you had a gentle touch of a hand, the brush of lips against skin, or a meaningful look that answered a question she hadn’t even thought to ask? 

Scully grabbed the hem of her sweater and pulled it over her head.

He shot up, the sheets of the bed pooling around his hips, exposing the line of his boxers which she fully intended to remove in the not-so-distant future. His hazel eyes watched her as his breath escaped as strangled puffs into the night. He didn’t move, to not disturb these unexplored waters, to risk a wave of sanity that would pull her back to shore.

This was sanity, she thought to herself. Denying the want that tormented her every night certainly wasn’t.

Her shirt fluttered elegantly to the ground as she exposed herself to him. She watched his eyes move over her pale shoulders, tracing her smooth collarbones down to the curve of her breasts peeking flirtatiously from the boring bra she regretted wearing. He traced down that valley to her stomach and rested on her hands as they unzipped the side of her dress pants, separating the hook and eye, and they fell to the ground in turn. She shook them off her ankles to join her abandoned shirt and stood before him. He drank in her body in excruciating silence.

Finally, she let out a strangled sigh of exasperation. “I’m not a museum exhibit, Mulder. You’re allowed to touch me.”

She expected him to bound up from the bed, but he moved slowly from underneath the sheets. He hovered in front of her, his boxers clinging to his narrow hips. They were Adam and Eve, clothed in shame even as they had yet to be touched by original sin. Neither of them moved and instead allowed their eyes to linger upon each other.

This is it, she mused. The still of the air before the explosion followed by the fallout that would change their world forever.

But that terrifying heat never came. Instead, his fingers feathered over the sensitive skin of her arm, leaving goosebumps in its wake. He took her in with his hands the same way he did with eyes: slowly, marveling with every curve, every dip of her body. He traced his fingers over her collarbone, dropped them down to the valley of her cleavage, over the swells of her breasts until he reached the battered cotton of her bra straps. She felt him push them down as his hands slid back over her shoulders. His breath was short and desperate and hot against her cheek.

“I would say you should be in a museum,” he whispered as his mouth curved into a smile. “But I can’t stand the thought of having to share you.”

“Tonight, you don’t have to,” she assured him.

The understanding hung in the air, and she wondered if he would change his mind and step back. She wouldn’t blame him. Their union was an immediate offer, birthed beneath a burning night she refused to think beyond. She couldn’t make a promise, not now, and he had every right to protect whatever scraps of his heart remained as her fear stripped them away.

But his hands slipped around her back, fingers chasing the curves of her shoulder blades until he found that which he sought. With an expert move, his gaze never leaving hers, he unhooked her bra and guided the straps down her arms, letting it fall to the floor. He looked down, his wide eyes baffled by the onslaught of her beauty, frozen in place as if he didn’t know where to start. Scully took his hand, guiding his palm upwards to cradle her left breast, and she felt him tremble against her.

She let him roam freely, calloused fingers catching along the impossibly soft skin beneath them. He explored her, his face focused and determined, finding the sectors of her skin that made her breathe and hiss. She wondered if he was filing it all away into that beautiful eidetic mind, a book of snapshots curated only for him to recall on the nights he couldn’t reach her body. His fingers lingered on her hardened nipples and she continued her sighs and moans, teaching him the parts of her body to touch, guiding him with her arousal.

He probably could have done it for hours, stood there, and worshipped her porcelain skin in the glow of the moonlight. But Scully’s belly began to uncoil at the thought of his hands elsewhere, and she eventually cupped his chin with her fingers to raise his face and meet her gaze.

“Mulder,” she sighed, trying to reign in her desperation.

“You’re beautiful,” he replied, and she felt her cheeks burn with heat so fierce she worried it would engulf her.

“I need more,” she told him, and his dreamy eyes focused on her, a serious look of determination sobering him completely. He advanced on her, gripping her hips as he forcefully turned her towards the bed, one finger crooked into the waistband of her panties while he shifted her down. He managed to slide them down her legs while he cradled her onto the twisted sheets on the mattress.

He lowered himself in front of her and Scully gasped, instinctively relaxing her knees even as he braced a hand against her thigh. He settled his mouth against her knee and planted a wet kiss before he ran his tongue unabashedly against her salty skin. His movements lit a fire above and below. She fought to keep her breath even, worried she would hyperventilate otherwise. The room tilted around her and wavered against her unsteady eyeline as if she could feel the very Earth whirl beneath them.

She lost track of the traces of him on her body but the feel of his lips against her center grounded the room back into place. He pushed her legs apart and she fell back onto the bed, a low moan undulating from the deepest recesses of somewhere previously unknown to her. His tongue worked against her, dipping in and out of her silky folds, all while he hitched one leg up over his shoulder for cleaner access. She barely even felt his fingers join his tongue during the onslaught of sensation. A cacophony of rushing blood and gasps and heartbeat pounded in her ears, unbridled passion leaping forward from the once coiled thing in her belly, finding its way up her body, threading painfully through the chambers of her heart.

“Mulder…” she reached out to him to grasp at him blindly. Somehow in the intoxicated chaos, his hand found hers, and their fingers laced together, holding on for dear life. She gripped him all the tighter as she felt the fire in her grow, right on the precipice of the passion she yearned for, ready to fall.

And then, nothing.

“What the hell, Mulder,” she gasped and pushed herself up onto her elbows. He remained nestled between her legs and his lips lingered at her knee as he stared at her with those beautiful, wicked eyes. The weariness from them had faded, replaced with something more feral. “Why the hell did you stop?”

He stood up without reply and stripped off his boxers unceremoniously. His erection bounced almost comically as he climbed onto the bed, hard with his want for her, and she wondered briefly what he would feel like between her lips.

Mulder lay prone on the bed and pressed his body to hers as she fought to catch her breath. His eyes explored her body, alabaster skin shaded with glorious pink, her breasts bouncing with the heave of every breath. His gaze finally wandered back to her face, his eyes gentle and probing.

“Mulder, we don’t have to keep going.” She felt her heart stiffen even as she spoke, but she had been the one to initiate this. If he couldn’t accept her race against the sunrise, she would understand.

“God, no. Dana…” he breathed her name and the creature she so valiantly fought twisted back to life. “Don’t doubt for a minute how much I want this.”

She understood, as he raised his fingers to her face and slowly traced her cheeks, outlining her features in the shadows. He didn’t want to rush it. Scully brushed her thumb lovingly against his lips, reveling at the velvety smoothness. How did she already know the feel of his lips so well? For how long it took to bare their all, how did she feel like she knew his body better than she knew her own?

This was the ultimate trust exercise and a voice laughed in the back of her mind. Certainly, one censured by an FBI team-building seminar.

“Tell me what you’re thinking,” he whispered, and she realized she must have looked a million miles away. She smiled up at him, brushing her fingers through his hair.

“I’m thinking about how you’re my one in five billion.”

He smiled and ducked his head to trace kisses across her freckled shoulders, so slow and deliberate she wondered if he’d vowed to mark every single one. Mulder finally buried his head against her neck and shifted to move over her body. His teeth nipped at the sensitive skin and passion rolled through her again, slow waves building into a storm.

“Are you just going to tease me all night?” she asked, her eyes fluttering shut as she blocked out everything in the world except for the agonizing feeling of his mouth working against her.

He lifted his head and a quiet moment passed before she realized he was waiting for her to open her eyes. She stared up at him as he hovered over her. The intensity of his arousal pressed against her hip and his breath heaved against her mouth, sweet with the smell of his scent mingled with her own.

“I can’t just hold your hand,” he murmured. “I want to see your face the first time I make you come.”

Scully flushed, her lips slack. His words burned from his mouth into the deepest parts of her body that yearned for him. He looked pleased and readjusted himself over her, one elbow resting to support him near her head, his other hand reaching out to hoist her thigh over his hip. His hardness brushed pleasantly across her, her body still slick and ready, pliant beneath him.

“You still okay?” he asked, one last time, allowing her a final out she desperately did not need.

“Shut up, Mulder,” she breathed.

He moved slowly, adjusting his body so he could slip his hand between them to guide him. It had been far too long since anyone touched her like this and she gasped, almost alarmed at the intrusion, and Mulder stared down at her patiently. It had been a long time for him, too.

“Just relax,” he whispered, and she nodded. Her eyes fluttered shut as she took a deep breath. He moved into her again, a little deeper, and she suspected he was enjoying the slow process even more than she was. Once he was in far enough to give himself some purchase he began to thrust slowly, his hips nearly keeping time with her labored breaths. “Come back to me, Scully.”

She didn’t realize how far into herself she’d fallen, her mind occupied by the blaze of every nerve in her body seemingly firing simultaneously. Scully opened her eyes to look up at him and she cupped her hand across the back of his neck, guiding his head towards hers until their foreheads touched. She stared up at him through the dark, her steel-blue eyes fixated on his heavenly hazel ones, and she thought the intensity of his stare may have been enough to bring her climax without a single touch.

He began to move faster, sinking into her deeper with every thrust. His hand lingered between their bodies; his fingers pressed against her most intimate spot, massaging the bundle of heightened nerves in time with his movements. She whimpered under him and stared down that precipice again, terrified to lose control. Even as that desirous creature inside spread through her, she wrestled it back, desperate to cling to her coherent mind even as she unraveled beneath him. She bit her tongue to stop the onslaught of curses and prayers she could feel lingering behind her lips.

Mulder, however, let himself fall fully into it, moaning and gasping. “God, Dana… You’re perfect.”

His words stilled her. She didn’t want him to stop – no, she desperately wanted him to continue to claim her body. She wanted to watch him torn asunder above her, to indulge in her dominion over his passion. But he was tumbling towards a place she was too scared to follow. She stared up into Mulder’s eyes and whimpered a pathetic moan, her fingernails digging into the flesh of his back, her other hand stretched against the sheets.

“Fox…”

He gasped and thrust against her harder, and she could tell he was starting to lose his rhythm. She pressed her heel into his hip harshly, bucking her hips to meet him halfway, but she could tell he was fighting it, waiting for her to catch up. So wrapped up in his mind, it took him a long moment to realize she was fading away.

“Scully, don’t.” He cupped her chin and forced her to broil in the firestorm of his eyes. His devotion sent a strange calm coursing through her body, and she felt her stranglehold lose its grip. “Jesus, Dana, shut down that brilliant analytical mind for two minutes and let me fuck you.” His words pounded in her ears and she could swear she felt their heartbeats in unison. “Let go for me. Trust me.”

Scully had spent months playing and replaying this scenario in her head. Nights when her fingers brushed against her throbbing skin as she whispered his name in the dark, finally falling out of her self-induced passion to bury her head in her pillow. Then she wallowed in the fear that dissuaded her from ever stepping into the frightening void of unmarked territories – here be dragons, she would think, her breath stilling in her throat.

But this wasn’t a siren song meant to consume her within a cold and unyielding tempest. This was the voice of love, and it was calling her home.

He held her so gently as if she might break. She knew those safe hands and the way they cradled her through the torment of her life, and she found that she wanted to shatter for him with the implicit trust that he would gather the pieces and reassemble her with care into something better.

His fingers worked in unison with their desperate movements and within seconds the waves of her climax wracked her quaking body. She gripped the bedsheets between her fingers, but her eyes never left his, allowing him that which he requested. Even as she felt the rush of blood to her face and the slack of her jaw, she didn’t feel embarrassed or lost. She felt powerful and free.

“Oh my God, Mulder,” she gasped, her muscles tightening around him and he came into her, desperate and wanton and entirely too beautiful.

They stared at each other for a long time as they fought to catch their breath, their sagging lips and dried tongues inches from each other, but never touching.

“That beat any fantasy I’ve ever had of you,” he finally marveled and slipped down to her side. She moaned as the absence of him let loose a cold that licked at her sweat-slicked body.

“I could say the same thing.”

As the darkness pulsated around them, both knew they were not ready to voice what happened between them. Their bodies in motion were one thing, but that moment when they came together, eyes locked on only the other – that was a truth neither of them had the strength to speak.

They lay side by side, panting, watching as the streetlights and passing cars dappled the ceiling in an orchestra of color. They both knew what came next. Even in fairytales, eventually, the clock struck midnight and the spell was broken.

The reality of what awaited them with the sunrise was a mystery, and neither seemed keen to chase it.

“What do we do now?” he finally asked, turning his head to look at her.

“We can’t do this again,” she replied, but she didn’t look at him. She probably thought the darkness of the room hid the tear that slipped down her cheek, but he saw it.

“I’m here.” He took her hand. “I’m not going anywhere. I don’t care if it takes you six days or another six years.”

“Don’t say that,” she whispered, finally turning her head to look at him. “I won’t ask you to wait for me.”

“You didn’t.” He raised her hand to his mouth and kissed it lovingly. “I won’t lie and say the idea of this being a one-time thing isn’t the scariest thought in the world. But if it is, I’ll accept it. You’ve been a part of me before the idea of making love to you even occurred to me. And you always will be.”

She smiled and turned her head to look at him. She hadn’t honestly believed him until she saw his bright eyes, free of that weariness that so usually weighed them. He loved her, and he didn’t need to hold her body to prove it.

“I should go home. We have work in a couple of hours.”

“Not yet,” he murmured and pulled her to him. She tucked herself into the warmth of his shoulder and inhaled the scent of their bodies together to capture in this hallowed land. “Just stay for a little longer. Let us have this, for just a little longer.”

She felt him doze off again, his slow breaths lulling her into a peaceful meditation, somewhere between dreaming and the waking world – the place where their love lived. For now, it would have to be enough.

But that could change. They’d seen stranger things, after all. It wasn’t outside of the realm of possibility.

She dozed next to him, and they sought out each other in their dreams, as they had so many times before. Soon the sun began to peek above the horizon and illuminated the bed where they lay. She opened her eyes lazily and soon wriggled out his grasp, out of his bed, and back into the place where she could safely coil the dangerous creature inside of her away once more.

By the time he awoke, she was gone.

**Author's Note:**

> I realized after I wrote this that they never kissed, and I decided to keep it that way. I felt like there was something subtly appropriate in the lack of that particular intimacy.
> 
> This is my first published smut, so any support or gentle criticism is absolutely welcome. I don't have a beta reader, so edits may be made over time as I catch new typos. Thanks to the many smut writers in the XF community who inspired me to finally jump this hurdle.


End file.
